Scott Morrison’s ‘extreme pragmatism’
A response to Katharine Murphy’s The End of Certainty.
First published in Quarterly Essay, no. 80, December 2020
Katharine Murphy, The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics
Quarterly Essay, no. 79, September 2020
In calling her Quarterly Essay The End of Certainty, Katharine Murphy gives a knowing nod to Paul Kelly’s identically titled classic of Australian political journalism, first published in 1992. It’s an odd choice. Kelly was referring to the era-defining destruction of the “Australian Settlement” that had determined Australian policy settings since Federation: White Australia, industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence. By contrast, I don’t think anyone could argue that the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, devastating though it has been, brings to an end any kind of certainty. The story of the past decade of Australian politics has been one of near-constant crisis and uncertainty, illustrated most obviously by our extraordinary prime ministerial churn, but also evident in the precariousness of many Australians’ lives long before the onset of COVID-19.
So the title felt like a misnomer, but as I read the essay I kept being reminded of Kelly, in the sense of Judith Brett’s memorable description in Quarterly Essay 78: “Australia’s very own Vicar of Bray … never far from the orthodoxies of the powerful.” Because although Murphy strains to demonstrate her bona fides as a watchful political analyst, what struck me most about the essay was its willingness to uncritically absorb Scott Morrison’s spin about his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to the present crisis. This stems, we are told, from his experience as a party director more interested in solving problems than — in the vein of his mentor John Howard — changing the country to align with his political philosophy:
Morrison doesn’t rhapsodise about “reform.” At his core, he’s a populist, and a fixer, not an ideologue. He finds shibboleths, the core philosophical mantras of some of his centre-right predecessors and contemporary colleagues, boring, tired, tedious, claustrophobic. Party directors are project managers, and it is helpful to think of Morrison as a project manager rather than the keeper of an ideological flame.
Coincidentally, Paul Kelly repeatedly asserted a similar view of Morrison and his government in The Australian before and after October’s delayed federal budget (and based on background interviews with Morrison and Josh Frydenberg): “It will be a budget of pragmatism, not ideology” (23 September); “It is about results and outcomes, not ideological theory or rhetorical inspiration” (26 September); “This budget is the culminating event of the new Liberal order under Morrison-Frydenberg concord and pragmatism” (10 October). When Murphy writes that “Morrison’s conservatism is extreme pragmatism in defence of what he regards as the core of the nation,” the power-worshipping banality of the press gallery doyen comes easily to mind.
All of this might have come across as defensible, if unedifying, insider journalism, but for the fact that it is so evidently untrue. As numerous alert journalists and commentators have noted, Morrison is a deeply ideological political operator leading a deeply ideological government. This is not only the view of Morrison’s opponents on the left. “If anything,” a senior government source told Laura Tingle following the Coalition’s surprise election victory in 2019, “this government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in the public service, in all of our institutions … They believe the left has been winning the war for the last twenty years and are determined to turn the tables.”
Prophetic as that warning has proven, Murphy seems unconvinced, and more intent on blaming the government’s ideological flourishes on its fringe elements, painting Morrison as an innocent victim of their escapades. The man who taunted Labor by smugly brandishing a lump of coal in parliament “couldn’t talk about the root cause of the [bushfire] disaster, climate change, because that’s quicksand, and the only chance he has of crafting a medium-term solution on that issue is not to talk about it.” Apparently Tony Abbott and co. somehow forced climate denial upon the Coalition against its (and Morrison’s) will. Meanwhile, universities were deliberately excluded from the JobKeeper scheme because of “a view within some quarters of the Coalition that universities are factories of left-wing thought” (my emphasis).
Does anyone seriously believe that these are minority views within the government? They are closer to unimpeachable pillars of Liberal faith. Denial has been the dominant Liberal approach to climate change since the 1990s, i.e. Scott Morrison’s entire career in backroom and parliamentary politics. Does he really deserve to be absolved of blame, or given the benefit of the doubt? Australian universities are presently facing an unprecedented crisis that threatens their very existence, and the Morrison government has not only refused to help, it has inflicted further damage by passing legislation designed to make the humanities and social science degrees it despises unaffordable to the vast majority of potential students. Is this kind of political vandalism just the work of the right-wing fringe, or vindictive and deliberate policy coming from the top?
According to Murphy, Morrison’s political missteps are the fault of the right-wing crazies, but when things are going well, such as when the formation of the National Cabinet leads to bipartisan, federal–state cooperation, it is because he is able to “muzzle the more ideological voices inside the Coalition.” The false narrative that Murphy has internalised is that Morrison is a more effective version of Malcolm Turnbull, leading a centrist government while managing its reactionary internal pests. The more miserable truth is that, despite the failure of the Dutton putsch in 2018 and the decline of the National Party, the hard right (inclusive of the prime minister) remains in control of the Coalition.
Murphy wants to believe that the pandemic and the government’s attendant policy decisions have caused a tectonic shift in Australian politics, whereby government spending will no longer be a dirty concept and the culture wars are relegated to an irrelevant sideshow. She fails to see the wood for the trees. The Morrison government had little choice but to spend big to alleviate the economic harm caused by COVID-19, but, as Richard Cooke observed in The Monthly in August, the spending will be “a down payment on future austerity budgets” and the Coalition’s ideological and institutional enemies will bear the brunt of the pain. No amount of spin about the prime minister’s innate pragmatism can hide these truths. ●
